Research

• Habitation Studies (ongoing)
• Recording Study (ongoing)
• Previously Published Studies (completed)

Current Studies

Habituation Studies

This research is approved by the Psychology/Sociology Research Ethics Board

Can young infants tell the difference between questions and statements?

Young infants are very sensitive to subtle differences in the intonation (melody) of speech. This study is looking at whether infants can discriminate (tell the difference between) the intonation of declarative sentences (statements) and those of questions. Infants hear a series of sentences, either declaratives or questions until they get bored. We then switch things up - play them some sentences that are declaratives and some that are questions. We look to see whether their interest perks up when they get the new sentences forms, but not when they get the old ones.

Can young infants tell the difference between different emotional sounds?

In this study, we are looking to see at what age infants begin to tell the difference between different expressions of positive emotion like "excited" and "relieved". Like the questions study above, we do this by playing them sounds from one emotion until they get bored. Then we test to see if they show increased interest to a new emotion they haven't heard yet.

Recording Study

This research is approved by the Psychology/Sociology Research Ethics Board

How do the language environments of daycare centers differ from home?

Despite the changes in parental leave laws in Canada in the last decade, many infants are still placed in child care before the age of two. Recent work at the NIH suggests that these early childcare experiences do have important influences on the language and cognitive development of young children. However, we do not yet know very much about the differences (both positive and negative) in language exposure between home care and external child care.

The laboratory is looking to recruit stay-at-home mothers, home-based child care centers and outside-of-home daycare facilities that care for infants under the age of two. We will be doing a detailed analysis of the acoustical and language characteristics of each of these environments. The study would involve taking acoustic measurements and recording the speech from adults both among themselves and to the infants. If you are interested in learning about how you can participate, please contact the lab for more information.

Previous Studies:

Some previous studies published by members of the lab:

Soderstrom, M., Conwell, E., Feldman, N., & Morgan, J.L. (2009). Statistical learning in language acquisition: Beyond demonstrations, towards a theory. Developmental Science, 12, 409-411. Copy available on request.

Soderstrom, M., Blossom, M., Foygel, I., & Morgan, J.L. (2008). Acoustical cues and grammatical units in speech to two preverbal infants. Journal of Child Language, 35, 869-902.

Soderstrom, M. (2008). Early perception-late comprehension? The case of verbal -s (A response to de Villers & Johnson, 2007). Journal of Child Language, 35, 671-676.

Soderstrom, M. & Morgan, J.L. (2007). Twenty-two-month-olds discriminate fluent from disfluent adult-directed speech. Developmental Science, 10, 641-653.

Soderstrom, M., White, K.S., Conwell, E. & Morgan, J.L. (2007). Receptive grammatical knowledge of familiar content words and inflection in 16-month-olds. Infancy, 12, 1-29. Please contact Lawrence Earlbaum Associates for permission to reprint this article.

Soderstrom, M. (2007). Beyond babytalk: Re-evaluating the nature and content of speech input to preverbal infants. Developmental Review, 27, 501-532.

Soderstrom, M., Kemler Nelson, D. G., & Jusczyk, P. W. (2005). Six-month-olds recognize clauses embedded in different passages of fluent speech. Infant Behavior and Development, 28, 87-94.

Soderstrom, M., Seidl, A., Kemler Nelson, D. G., & Jusczyk, P. W. (2003). The prosodic bootstrapping of phrases: Evidence from prelinguistic infants. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 249-267.